RUSH: To Duluth, Minnesota, we go. Bob, you’re up first today. Great to have you on the EIB Network. Hi.
CALLER: Hi, Rush. Johnny Rabbitt KXOK dittos to you.
RUSH: Johnny Rabbitt!
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: Don Pietromonaco!
CALLER: (chuckles)
RUSH: That was his real name.
CALLER: Right. I was born and raised on the same stations you were. Rush, I was wondering if you could differentiate for me between what Gruber refers to see to as the stupidity of the American populace and what you refer to as, quote, “low-information voters” and/or on many occasions you’ve spoken of “a nation of economic illiterates.” You know, just to be clear: To me, Gruber is the prototypical, totalitarian lefty weasel.
That’s not my contention, but I believe there’s more than a grain of truth. There’s plenty of truth to his characterization of the electorate. I mean, prima facie evidence: Obama being elected twice and the fact that the left has been pretty much kicking our butts for the last 25 years. I mean, in other words, the operations of Obama and underlings like Gruber couldn’t work if you didn’t have, for the most part, an abjectly stupid populace who two-thirds of which in my opinion can’t spell the word “Constitution.”
RUSH: Well, there’s no doubt that there is a segment of the population that’s totally ignorant on matters like this: Politics, day-to-day knowledge of things. But there are also two things that have brought that about before you get to immediately blaming this on the people. There’s the education system that’s been teaching them and the media, both news and pop culture, that’s been reinforcing it all.
Conservatives have no presence. The news media now more than ever, but pop culture? Not much. By that I mean television shows, movies, books. That’s why we at the Rush Revere time-travel adventure series are making inroads there on American history. But it’s too simplistic, I think, to say people are “stupid.” They know what they know. They know what they’ve been taught. They know what they’ve been told.
I, actually, just to repeat… Even though you’re right, there’s all kinds of economic illiterates out there. Gruber is one! Gruber is an economic illiterate. He’s a theoretician. He has never had to put his theories into real practice except this one. His theories are in practice, and they are a disaster. He wrote this law. This is the best work he’s ever done, he says. This is the best he’s got to offer.
This is an absolute disaster! He is an economic illiterate. He may know theory, and he may know equations, and he may know causes and reactions and this kind of thing. But he doesn’t know practical application of economic theory. It all has remained a theory to him. I really believe, folks, that he was not saying what he was saying in a literal sense. Now, stop and think about this.
If you have to lie, if you have to lie about what’s in your legislation because the American people are too stupid, you’re saying one of two things. You’re saying, “They’re too stupid to appreciate how brilliant we are,” or you’re not calling them stupid at all. If you have to lie, it’s because they will know the truth, which you can’t afford for them to know. You can’t have the American public knowing what’s really in this bill.
So you have to lie to them.
Not because they’re too stupid. You lie to them because they’re too smart, because they’ll figure it out. The stupid comment I think… Given the arrogant condescension and contempt that people like Gruber hold everyday, normal, what they consider average Americans in, I think when he calls them stupid, what he means is they’re too stupid to appreciate his brilliance.
If you look leftist comments now, after the election, their postelection comments are, “Look at how stupid these people are! Look at the way they voted. They’re too stupid. They rejected us. Look at how stupid they are.” They do believe voters are stupid, but in Gruber’s case I actually believe… If you have to cover the truth from somebody, if you have to lie about the truth, it means that the people who would see the truth wouldn’t like it, which makes them smart enough to figure it out.
The truth is, he doesn’t think that you’re stupid enough to deal with all this. They had to lie to you, and your stupidity is accepting the lie. “Your stupidity is believing me.” The stupidity is all… It may sound a little convoluted here, and it may be too fine a point anyway. ‘Cause he’s calling people stupid, and that’s really all that matters. That defines who they are. I appreciate the call.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: This is kind of comical, too. I have CNN on up here, and right now they’ve got a guest on there, Fareed Zakaria GPS, who was just discovered to have committed another three or four acts of plagiarism! Yeah, on top of the previous acts or incidents of plagiarism. There he is as a guest in a discussion about the Regime reassessing ISIS. What must it be like to work there?
You go to work at CNN, and you know you don’t have an audience. See, I think, as long as we’re talking psychology and attitude — and, look, folks, I really don’t want to beat a dead horse. You know, sometimes it takes me three or four attempts to actually communicate my real meaning. Sometimes it takes me that many times to get there. On this Gruber business and who he thinks is stupid, it doesn’t make any sense.
I mean, it’s an indictment, and it’s… (sigh) I don’t want to confuse anybody here. He called the American people stupid and he believes it. There’s no question about it. But you don’t have to lie to stupid people. Stupid people will be gullible and accept whatever you tell ’em. They won’t care. You have to lie in order to keep yourself from being found out. You have to lie if the people you’re lying to are too smart.
I really think that the people that Gruber was lying to are the media, based on this Ron Fournier piece. He’s a guy like everybody that voted for Obama and everybody in the media, who thinks Obama’s excrement doesn’t stink. I mean, he’s The Messiah! He’s the guy who in 2008 was the answer to everything, and they believed everything he ever said. So here comes Obamacare. “He wants to ensure the uninsured?
“Oh, that’s a beautiful thing, and we really want it to happen! It’s so great! I believe him! Oh, it’s great!” And then he comes up with this convoluted plan that he says is gonna “bend the cost curve down,” which means it’s gonna be cheaper. “You get to keep your doctor, get to keep your plan! Your premium’s gonna come down $2,500!” And they believed it! So I think Gruber had to lie about what’s in the bill to keep the media on board, because the media is how the low-information end up finding out things.
It’s the media that gets the low-information crowd on board for anything, and it’s the media that Gruber had to lie to because if the media had discovered… At this point they couldn’t take the risk that the media would willingly join them in this deceit. And I don’t care what anybody says: No matter how slavish the media is, Obama still doesn’t like ’em, and they have a tough time with that, too.
They want to be loved. They want to be adored. They want to be in the clique. They want Obama to think of them as an equal. He doesn’t. He disdains them. Like any figure of his nature who wants as much control over people as possible, he resents that they do what they do. He’s never gonna like them. They know this. So I think when Gruber says, “Look, people were too stupid to figure this out,” what he was really saying was:
“We had to lie about this because we had the media on our side, and we couldn’t jeopardize that.” But that does not mean he doesn’t think you’re stupid. They do. They think everybody’s stupid, and they hold average Americans in contempt. There’s no question about. So back to CNN. How do you get up and go to work there every day, when you know nobody’s watching, when you don’t have any audience?
What must you tell yourself? Talk about lying. You have to tell yourself the world is watching. You have to tell yourself the audience is huge, otherwise what you’re doing doesn’t matter. It’s the same thing… (interruption) Yeah. In fact, I’ve even told this story. One of the things that I learned early on about why radio people are literally basket cases — and most of them are. (interruption)
Well, you’re laughing in there, but do you think I’m wrong about this? Let’s look at the day of a radio personality. The personality gets up, goes to work. What’s that? Sitting in a room all by him- or herself unless he got an occasional guest, but you’re basically alone. Maybe a couple people on the other side of the glass. Outside of that, there’s no evidence anybody’s listening.
You have to create circumstances to prove to you you have an audience. And you end up, if you hope to have any success, you tell yourself that there are many, many, many people — tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands, millions — listening. You tell yourself this. They’re hanging on every word. It’s required. You have to have this kind of an attitude. Imagine doing a program if you think nobody’s listening.
You wouldn’t put anything into it. You wouldn’t care because nobody’s gonna hear it anyway. So you have to… It’s not so much lie to yourself, but you have to create this image that everybody’s hanging on every word. But then your show ends, and then you leave that little glass-encased room, and you go out in the world, and you find nobody cares about you, and you discover that nobody heard what you had to say.
You thought you just had a bang-up show! You just kicked butt as big as Kim Kardashian and you just scored big. And then you leave, and you go home, and you go to grocery store. Nobody knows who you are. Nobody heard a word you said. It’s a psychological challenge. This is why radio people are nuts, and not just radio.
CNN people have the same thing. They’re in there that little studio, and they’re doing their news, and they’re telling themselves, “Wolf Blitzer, everybody’s hanging on every word,” and they’re not. (interruption) Well, that’s what they tell themselves. At CNN, what they tell themselves is, “Well, the people are too stupid to appreciate what we do! Obviously Limbaugh is right; they aren’t watching.
“But the opinion makers are, and the policy makers are. They have us on at the Department of Treasury. They have us on in the Oval Office. They have us on.” So they tell themselves that the real important people are listening, and that’s how they psychologically get through it. Folks, I’m telling you, it’s true. It’s a lot to keep in perspective.
You’ve seen people who think that they’re just hot stuff and the biggest thing going and they’re running around like they own the world. Nobody knows who they are and they laugh at ’em behind their backs and so forth. It’s a very, very, very challenging psychological exercise. Like in my case. I’ll give you a little inside baseball. How many of you were raised…?
How many of you, when you grew up, had your parents tell you that it was okay if people hated you? (interruption) That didn’t happen to you, H.R.? Snerdley, did your parents say, “It’s okay if somebody hates you”? (interruption) They did? Well, my point is, nobody’s raised to want to be hated. Everybody’s raised to want to be loved. Most families, responsible families (this is the old days when we had those) raise their kids to be functioning members of the local community.
To not embarrass the family, the family name. Do all these things. It’s common, ordinary. Nobody is raised to go out and be hated, right? Okay, so I’m the same way. There was not in any way, shape, manner, or form the way I was brought up. The only guy I can think of that might have been raised that wanted to be hated was Hitler. Outside of that, and maybe Attila the Hun, or could have been Genghis Khan.
But psychologically, I had to learn to take as a sign of success the fact that 20, 25% of the people who hear me every day gonna hate my guts. Nobody is raised to take that as a measure of good. I had to learn how to do that on my own, and you hear people say, “It’s a badge of honor to be disagreed with or hated by whoever,” and you do. You have to arrive at that point, but it’s not anything…
Most people want to be loved and adored by everybody. That’s what social media is all about. (interruption) Well, yeah, your parents tell you, “Not everybody’s gonna like you and you have to learn to ignore those that don’t like you.” But I’m talking about this: Nobody is raised with the instruction, “It’s a good thing to be hated! Go out there and make people hate you. That’s how you get success.”
That doesn’t happen to people. So learning to have to take that — from people that don’t even know me — as a measure of success, took me awhile to adjust to. (interruption) What is this? Is this a joke or did this really happen? (interruption) Katie Couric and David Gregory did Election Night coverage from a bar in Washington streaming on the Internet? (interruption) Okay.
So Snerdley said, “Okay, tell me this. David Gregory,” who was fired because his network preferred Jon Stewart. (interruption) Well, it’s important. If you want to get my psychological take on this, you gotta throw the factors in. Why is he in bar doing Election Night coverage? Because the new female British executive at NBC canned him and wanted Jon Stewart. Furthermore, NBC backed up a Brinks truck to Jon Stewart, and he still said no.
So they went out and got F. Chuck Todd, who may be doing Election Night coverage in a bar someday. So there’s Katie Couric. Where’s she? She’s at Yahoo? She’s at Yahoo? And David Gregory! Two former giants in the broadcast news business are doing Election Night coverage in a bar. I guess streamed over the Internet is what you mean. And so… (interruption) Or, for Yahoo? Oh! Oh-ho!
It was for Yahoo. So that means Gregory was a guest of Katie Couric. Okay, so the question is: “Psychologically, how do they tell themselves that what they’re doing matters? How do they tell themselves that their jobs — in a bar, or Election Night, on the Internet — is big and important?” The answer to the question is: “Where are they?” They’re in a bar. They do it by drinking.
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
RUSH: Folks, this is why I’ve always said that the five years I worked for the Kansas City Royals — and I was 28 through age 33 — I made the least amount of money I’ve ever made as an adult in those five years. Those five years were the most valuable to me for what was to come in life later. Those five years, in a lot of ways. One of the ways they were really important, I’d always, other than a shoeshine job, I’d always been in radio. And it’s an unreal existence. It really is.
And because you’re on the radio, you think of it differently than consumers of it do. And I became a consumer of radio. I had nothing to do with radio when I got out of it. I was in marketing and sales at the baseball team, and I had nothing to do with radio. I began to notice how people used it and what about radio they commented on and what they didn’t. I began to see how it was part of everybody’s day in an habitual way rather than an appointment, except in certain circumstances.
And those five years — the first two I thought I was threw with radio. But after the first two I figured out I’m not cut out for corporate conformity. So radio I loved the most, so I figured I’d get back to doing that at some point, and if I ever did, it totally changed my approach to how I would do it, if I ever got back in, and if I was ever given the freedom to do it my way. There was no guarantee on either of those. And there’s something to be said for getting away from what you do for awhile to regain or change your perspective on it. It can be helpful. It was for me.
And for people like Gruber and all of these think tank eggheads who have never had any real-world experience, and there are so many of them now that are in daily control of so much of our lives, they have no ability to relate to us at all. And it matters. It matters greatly that they are imposing regulations on businesses here and there for whatever reason and they’ve never, ever run a business. And in most cases they’ve never had a job at a business. In most cases they’ve never been fired. They don’t know what that is. They can’t conceive of it.
And yet these are the people that end up in powerful, bureaucratic positions who have autocratic power to regulate aspects of daily life with which they have never or rarely interacted. I believe it’s one of the major problems and challenges that we have. They’re just a bunch of theoreticians who have vastly inflated ideas of their self-worth and their importance and their value. And concurrently with that, they have vast opinions about how inferior and stupid people unlike them are, particularly people in south who like guns, or who oppose Planned Parenthood. I mean, they really have contempt for you.
They have contempt for the religious.
That’s all fine and dandy, but they’ve got positions of power now over all these aspects of American life they have nothing in common with, no experience in. They’re all leftists who have a basic contempt for self-reliance, contempt for rugged individualism, a contempt for people who can take care of themselves or who excel, contempt for achievement, it’s not fair, it’s not right. They think the game must be rigged if somebody does really well at something. When, in fact, the game they’re in is what’s rigged.